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A high-ranking European Union official urged the use of open standards and open source software Tuesday during a speech in Brussels at a conference Tuesday hosted by OpenForum Europe. In order for companies to compete fairly against each other in the technology industry "standards are more important...

Disney World and Google are teaming up to take tourism to a new dimension. Walt Disney Parks and Resorts worked with programmers at Google Earth to create a fully three-dimensional virtual viewing experience -- said to be the most advanced rendering Google has ever created. Walt Disney World Resort ...

Computers have become more complex in recent years as demands on systems have continued to increase in size due to the amount of external devices, software, hardware and communication components. Technical professionals are depending more and more on the Internet, a blog or a peer whenever they need...

The power of community is grossly underestimated in this country. Current collaborative trends on the Internet, from Web 2.0 to Wikipedia models, are seen as merely social or arguably informative in nature. That's a bit like saying the U.S. Constitution, another collaborative work, is a fetching fli...

Chipmaker Via Technologies took the wrapper of its OpenBook Mini-Note reference design Tuesday, making the blueprint for its latest ultra mobile PC available to anyone who wants to manufacture low-cost computers based on Via's line of low-power processors. The open source, computer-assisted design f...

Facebook has come up with a new plan to fight off its competitors: open sourcing its application platform. Citing multiple sources, TechCrunch reports that Facebook is planning to form an open source community around its API, which it launched just a year ago. We can expect that the four pillars of ...

Increasingly, managers find themselves leading teams that are scattered in different cities or even continents, working on projects which have to be flexible enough to rapidly evolve to meet changing business needs. In this environment, business managers are starting to learn what software developer...

Second Life is no place for kids, a Republican congressman declared Monday. U.S. Representative Mark Kirk has sent a letter to the Federal Trade Commission requesting a consumer alert warning about the dangers of Second Life, which he charges could expose kids to child predators and registered sex o...

Sun Microsystems and the OpenSolaris community it created a few years ago have officially released the Unix-based OpenSolaris operating system into the wild. The two organizations shared the news at the CommunityOne Developer Conference Monday in San Francisco. OpenSolaris is based on Sun's Solaris ...

While Wikipedia may be the best known example, wikis are not only becoming the first place people turn when conducting online research, but also when they're looking to build specialist online communities. It's not surprising, then, that wikis dedicated to real estate are emerging. InmanWiki -- part...

The Linux operating system is not immune to virus infections, although Linux-specific viruses are extremely rare. Linux servers face more risk of virus attack than Linux desktops. That said, IT security and control firm Sophos recently issued a warning about potential virus infections targeting Linu...

Tony Baer has a great rundown of Monday's EclipseCon OSGi-based runtime Equinox news. Extending the Eclipse community's unity to runtimes makes a ton of sense, given that developers can focus on the applications and business logic and become far less concerned with complex deployment issues. Write o...

Larry Sanger was an early participant in Wikipedia, and in 2006 he founded the Citizendium, which bills itself as "the citizens' compendium." Like Wikipedia, Citizendium is an encyclopedia that invites the public to contribute content. The two share other similarities as well, but the two are distin...

The American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public Citizen and twelve media groups are asking a federal court to lift an injunction against the global whistleblower Web site Wikileaks.org. Two weeks ago, in the U.S. District Court of the Northern District of California, J...

WSO2, an open source SOA provider, has combined JavaScript programming and Web services with the launch of its Mashup Server 1.0. This open source offering, which can be downloaded without subscription fees, will allow enterprises to consume, aggregate and publish information in a variety of forms a...

MuleSource, a provider of open source service-oriented architecture infrastructure software, has jumped into the SOA governance pool with the community release this week of Mule Galaxy 1.0. Galaxy, an open source platform with integrated registry and repository, allows users to store and manage an i...

Bernard Golden is convinced there are two chasms to cross for a commercial open source company and I believe there is only one. As I wrote in my recent blog post, "There is no such thing as commercial open source," the attempt to ride the title wave of open source into a magical business domain call...

2007 was an eventful year for the commercial open source industry. We have seen many new entrants, and now there are hundreds of viable companies that are based on open source, filling nearly every segment of the software market. We have seen significant exit events from companies such as XenSource ...

Amid warnings by its creators that users shouldn't expect much yet, an alpha version of open source-based Wikia Search launched Monday with the goal of eventually becoming a user-regulated challenger to Google and other search engines. Created by Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, Wikia Search i...

For a computer addict, choosing a Linux distribution is much like being an unsupervised child in a candy store. So many flavors with so many choices make the task of picking just one type of candy a near-impossible -- but fun-filled -- task. For a consumer or business exec who must pick a Linux dist...